I *heart* my MacBook Pro, Dropbox and Gmail

Posted by admin in Technology, Web design & development on February 6th, 2010

I was on the road today – and finally felt the full advantage of getting myself into The Cloud.

The main issue? Synchronising my digital life across more than one computer. Storage and email are the main issues…

While according to some Apple’s dot Mac/MobileMe may well be the current cream of cloud subscription services in North America – out here in backwater Europe performance is sh*te. Particularly iDisk. While Apple’s webmail is good – it’s trying too hard to be a desktop application and failing.

For storage I can’t recommend Dropbox enough and for e-mail there’s Gmail…

Dropbox

Now I’ve got my Sites folder (and  a few salient folders of Work In Progress) in Amazon’s S3 cloud via Dropbox. The free service is great (2GB) and the paid versions (50/100GB) are not expensive…

  • It’s easy.
  • It’s speedy. One of the technical features of the system is that files are stored as blobs of hashed deltas (wikipedia says it betterer )… popular files are recognized and appear online without having to be transferred – for example some reference books and software libraries that uploaded very smartly.
  • It’s nimble. As the thing works with deltas and blobs it’s also quick to mirror things when you’ve just been making minor edits or rearranging things.
  • 30 days of versioning for all your files - TimeMachine in the Cloud!

Syncing external folders across multiple machines with Dropbox

The trick to synchronising your ~/Sites folder (or any folder that you don’t want to move into the Dropbox watched folder ) between two or more Macs/PCs/Cray supercomputers is to temporarily turn off Dropbox and make your first sync manually between them – then create a symlink into the watched folder. Create the symlink by typing a command into a Terminal window… it goes a little something like this:

ln -s  /path/to/folder/name_desired_folder ~/Dropbox/desired-folder

Then you can turn Dropbox back on. Now I’m coding on the go with hassle-free syncing and backup. That is nice.

Email

Well I’ve become a Gmail man. It may not be pretty but Gmail has threaded conversations done properly and labels. Took me a while to get used to threaded conversations [takes me a while to get most things!] but now I find them indispensable. Gmail’s generally very good at keeping quoted text out of your face making the threads very readable. Obviously threaded conversations aren’t so useful if people veer off-track or forsake the reply button in favour of the new message. Offline access was not robust in Safari and now it’s not an option as Mac OS 10.6 won’t have it.  So I still use Mail.app as a backup.

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Using WordPress.com stats and Google Analytics on a WordPress instal

Posted by admin in Analytics, Web design & development on February 3rd, 2010

Wondering which you should use?

Use both. (As recommended by Mr WordPress himself…)

The WordPress.com Stats WordPress plugin provides all the basic daily dose of stats you need – and all easily accessible from the WordPress Dashboard.  Google Analytics gives you that extra oompf when you need it and will of course tie in with any Google advertising you have going on.

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WordPress 403 import error and how to solve it

Posted by admin in Web design & development on February 2nd, 2010

[or Check Your WordPress.com Privacy Settings]

Yesterday I was being an eedgit. For the life of me couldn’t figure out why I was getting a 403 error “Remote file returned error response 403 Forbidden”. I was trying, and failing, to get image attachments to import from a WordPress.com XML export file into a self hosted WordPress installation.

I wracked my brains and Google but I couldn’t figure it out. Helpfully the blog I was working on [it's revamp of my friend Stewart Andersen's Homes and Travel site - now live ] is based on the excellent Carrington Framework by Crowd Favorite. Whilst researching it I’d noticed a link to their WordPress Help Center on their forums. I thought I’d have a shot at it and hoped it could be sorted within the three minutes of free help they offer…

Talking it through with them I realised what I’d done. To avoid duplicate content issues I’d set the WordPress.com blog to private before I finished the import. That simple. WordPress.com was deying access to the new blog based on the instructions I’d given. I was logged in so everything looked fie but the new site.

The answer: Make sure your WordPress.com privacy settings are not set to private!

I guess it’s the sort of stupid thing people don’t admit to – so until now no Google results to find.

Anyway many thanks to Matt Walters and the WordPress Help Center…

When you’re stuck, talk to the bear or give the WordPress Help Center a shout… [thanks guys!]

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Google Analytics custom segment based on referring site

Posted by admin in Analytics on December 3rd, 2009

Jump to answer

I’m a lover of Google Analytics – once you get the hang of the thing it’s a very powerful tool and enables quick reporting on visitor metrics with quite some granularity. [Did I really just say that? Oh dear.]

Especially useful are custom Advanced Segments. I’ve used UTM codes to track responses from email campaigns – very handy but requires you to craft your URLs. If you want to track incoming links for a particular website – or referrer, without control of URLs that actually link to you – it’s very easy – just not well documented – or easy to find with a Google search.

Advanced Segment based on referrer:

  1. set up a new advanced segment
  2. add “Source” from the Dimensions/Traffic Sources/
  3. add the domain that need tracking into the value field.

It’s that easy!

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FTP mget without prompt

Posted by admin in Web design & development on December 1st, 2009

Long time no command line FTP.

Today I had to transfer 700Mb from one server to another in the same data center: SSH in to server #1 to grab the files from server #2 – but “a” wasn’t working as an answer to mget as it usually does – meaning “get all” – when prompted for each file if you really want to download it. 

I really didn’t fancy having to watch/wait/click as 1400 files got copied over. 

Easy answer: type “prompt” in your ftp shell to toggle the prompting on and off.

Job done.

All files sent over in a jiffy without having to do a 4,000 km round trip – and freeing up my rather stuffed internet connection in the meantime.


ssh user@host.com
cd path/to/your/files
ftp ftp.host.com
cd path/to/your/files
prompt
mget *
bye
exit

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How to group items in HTML select menus

Posted by admin in Web design & development on November 29th, 2009

Here’s something I learnt last week, just as the title says: how to group items in an (x)HTML select drop down list. This trick, which I’d assumed was done with magic (or rather DHTML or JavaScript trickery), is actually very easy to achieve being straight forward HTML markup.

[Found in a referenced post linked to by Laura Carlson's excellent [webdev] reference pages (subscribe to the list server here)…]

…the secret, as explained by “Web Teacher” here, is simply to wrap the items you want to group  in the select list with

<optgroup label="group_title"> and </optgroup>

Another good point made there is that to make a select list multiple choice you just need to add the attribute multiple="multiple" into the opening select tag (and make it clear to the users that this is the case as well as how to actually select mulitiple items…)

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JavaScript Rounded Corners

Posted by admin in Web design & development on November 27th, 2009

Rounded corners with CSS and graphics is OK – but a pain to set up – requiring custom images and plenty of extra markup. JavaScript – particularly when helped by jQuery comes to the rescue and makes it fairly trivial. Requiremtents: must work with IE6, IE7, iE8, FF and Safari (note about IE8 below).

Main contenders:

  1. for jQuery: jquery.corner.js from rc.rctonline.nl
  2. for jQuery: jquery.corner.js from malsup.com
  3. for jQuery: cornerz
  4. stand alone: curvycorners

Using #1 at the moment. Would like to try them all again in the light of the IE8 workaround below. Gotta say I now think #3 (cornerz) looks most promising in terms of size and ability. Going to have another look to see which ones look to CSS first (for those browsers that are modern – and not Internet Explorer) before turning to JavaScript.

Problem with most of these is IE8 doesn’t play nice… fix seems simply to add the behave like IE7 meta tag: <tt><meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ /></tt>

First impressions:

  1. good, non-transparent outside corner
  2. good,
  3. throws errors in IE7, non-transparent outside corner
  4. slow in IE,

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